Can Congress Do The Job?

NEW ORLEANS — John F. Witte has a message for Congress: Do the tax-reform job, or admit you can`t and pass the responsibility to somebody else.

Witte is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has been studying tax legislation for a just-published book, ``The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax.``

In a paper presented during last week`s convention of the American Political Science Association here, he raised a troubling question, not just for his colleagues but for the members of Congress returning to face the latest struggle over tax reform.

In essence, the question is: Why has ``the income tax mess,`` as he calls it, gotten worse since Congress reformed its structure and procedures in the 1970s?

Witte`s argument is not easy to dismiss. He starts with the observation that the income tax system is almost universally regarded as unfair, complex and inefficient. Next, he makes the point that many of the worst features of the Internal Revenue code have been added since the House and Senate

``democratized`` their procedures in the `70s.

Before then, he points out, the inequities in the code were often blamed on the fact that the tax-writing committees (especially House Ways and Means) were special-interest bastions, operated largely in secret and controlled by powerful chairmen accountable to nobody.

So in the `70s Congress ``reformed`` itself. It removed many of the Ways and Means Committee chairman`s arbitrary powers, expanded the committee membership and made it more representative of the House, and ordered it to make its key decisions in public.

What happened? The evidence shows that after the procedural reforms more loopholes and preferences went into the code, its complexity grew and the revenue system failed by ever-more-massive margins to produce enough money to finance all the spending Congress was approving.

In short, Witte argues that democratization and reform in Congress have taken a bad tax system and made it worse.

Is he right? You can punch some holes in his argument. He does not note, for example, the one large area of congressional procedure that was left unreformed in the `70s: the financing of congressional campaigns.

Members of the tax-writing committees don`t have to scrounge for campaign funds, of course. The contributions come rolling in to all of them who don`t expressly forbid them, and some of those contributions give the donors special access and influence when it`s tax-writing time.

But I think Witte is right when he says the basic problem involves ``a fundamental weakness of representative democracy.`` Deep down, most people prefer lower taxes and special benefits, and the ``institutional

arrangements`` provided in the congressional reforms of the `70s do ``allow excessive, relatively unconstrained representation of short-term interests.`` Witte`s suggestion is to take the taxing power out of Congress` hands and give it to a ``Federal Revenue Board,`` with members appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress.

I think that recommended solution is extreme--and I`d like to think it`s unnecessary. A Congress stripped of the power to set tax rates would be a sorry-looking excuse for the legislative branch the Founding Fathers wanted to make the foundation stone of the federal government.

The responsible actions taken by Congress in raising revenues in 1982 and 1984 demonstrate that it is capable of rising above itself and doing what the national interest requires. But those measure were not enough, and responsible action by Congress on taxes is now the only thing that will prove that radical remedies like Witte`s are not necessary.